Food and Wine on Vis

Throughout the island’s history, one common thread has been its reputation as a center of gastronomy. As long ago as the second century B.C., the Alexandrian scholar Athenaeus was extolling the region’s wine: “At Issa . . . wine is made which is superior to every other wine whatever.”

Winemaking using the local grape varieties — vugava for white, plavac for red — remains a thriving cottage industry today. But Vis also boasts the food to accompany it: This is often described as the culinary capital of the Adriatic.

In the evening, we go to one of its seafood standard-bearers. Jastozera, meaning “lobster,” is a beguilingly ramshackle joint where the diners sit on planks set over the sea. Nets and ropes hang from the ceiling, rowboats float in the illuminated water, and the rusted frame of a spinning wheel provides the base for our table. When our large-bellied Italian neighbors order thermidor, a waitress takes up a pole to hoist the restaurant’s eponymous specialty — big blue crustaceans with bolt-cutter pincers — out of the lobster cages that sit directly below us.

Life at Vis speed

We first came here during a Croatian island-hop in 2005, but little seems to have changed since that accidental discovery. Vis Town’s old facades — all white stone quarried on the distant island of Brac — still grace the waterfront. Elderly olive-skinned locals ornament the benches that line the promenade. In the cool of evening, families come out to swim from the wood-slat pontoons that protrude into the bay.

The apartment we return to after our hours by the sea is typical of this contented stasis. We stay in Kut, on the east edge of town in a room that verges right onto the sea, the wall beneath its shuttered windows lapped by the tide. Accommodation on Vis consists almost exclusively of sobes — self-contained apartments like this one, locally owned and rarely more than $100 a night. The one large hotel, Hotel Issa, a whitewashed carbuncle on the harbor’s western peninsula, is incongruous and unloved. With the island’s 1,000 rooms widely dispersed over an area similar in size to that of Manhattan, and with camping prohibited, there’s no overcrowding even in peak season.

“No one on Vis went out looking for tourism; the tourists found us,” explains Drazen Gazija, the owner of our sobe and a former president of the Vis tourist office. “Vis is the place to come if you want pomalo.” ‘“Pomalo” — the Dalmatian philosophy of doing things slowly, little by little — is a spirit that has seeped into the island’s very soil.

Taking it slow on the Croatian island of Vis

“The Mediterranean as it once was.”

As tourism slogans go, this one has always held a special allure for me. Launched by the Croatian tourist board to invigorate its ailing vacation industry after the breakup of Yugoslavia, it’s a motto that has graced billboards and glossy magazine ads for a decade. And this morning, I’ve stepped off the ferry onto an island that embodies the claim better than any other.

Lying 30 miles off the Croatian mainland, Vis is the remotest of the populated Dalmatians, the archipelago of 1,185 islands that pepper the eastern Adriatic like seeds scattered by the sirocco wind. Like many of its neighbors, it has always boasted the raw materials necessary to become a quintessential Mediterranean bolt-hole: miles of pebbled beaches, grape-and-olive agriculture and seafood by the netful. But it was a unique quirk of history that set it on course to fulfill the slogan’s halcyon promise. On the Mediterranean authenticity scale, Vis strikes an exquisite old-school note, the perfect balance between amenity and low-key local charm.

Makarska, Croatia: Secret Seaside

Most visitors to Dalmatia head straight for the islands, but the Makarska Rivijera on the mainland coast, between Split and Dubrovnik, is home to some of the country’s loveliest stretches of beach. Running from Brela in the north to Gradac in the south, the riviera is 38 miles long and centres on Makarska.

Makarska itself is built around a deep sheltered bay, and backed by the dramatic rocky heights of Mount Biokovo (5,770ft), which acts as a buffer from the harsher inland climate. Biokovo’s sea-facing slopes are criss-crossed by well-marked trails, so besides swimming in the deep turquoise Adriatic, it’s possible to get in some hiking or mountain biking too.